Network components such as switches, and various further types of electronic components, experience field failures and are returned for repair, replacement or analysis. Console data from a switch, or, generally, data from various types of electronic components, is useful in diagnosing field failures. Operating systems such as Linux may offer a logging feature and it is common to write software to write logs to nonvolatile memory such as flash. However, software-based logging is vulnerable to failure of a CPU (central processing unit), and the same circumstances that could crash a network switch or other electronic component could also crash the CPU that is responsible for executing the logging. Writing to flash memory requires a working kernel along with a method and working flash device. The kernel could be unable to write for many software reasons and long operating systems delays may cause the writes to be lost due to system errors that occur later. To use flash properly, blocks of data must be written at one time, thus write latency is significant and may cause the most recent data, perhaps even the cause of the failure, to be missed. In addition, slow writes to flash memory consume valuable system resources and burden a CPU or a filesystem. It is within this context that the embodiments arise.